


Flavor of the Month: Chocolate

by Layna_Writes



Category: Original Work
Genre: Gen, When Blaine was a kid
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-20
Updated: 2020-09-20
Packaged: 2021-03-07 22:09:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 972
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26564902
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Layna_Writes/pseuds/Layna_Writes
Summary: A story from Blaine's childhood explains a lot.
Relationships: Blaine Garu/Kourt Crowe





	Flavor of the Month: Chocolate

**Author's Note:**

> This is one of a series of stories about Blaine Garu, Spare Prince of Eab Nanoorn, and Kourt Crowe, Jedi shapeshifter. They take place in the Star Wars universe, several hundred years before Star Wars: The Phantom Menace.

I'm the way I am because of the time I got caught in the chocolate pudding.

OK, I know there are other contributing factors. A lot of it's hereditary; anyone will tell you I'm a pretty typical Garu spare prince, blond and hungry and always up for a diversion. But the pudding thing -- that sort of confirmed it.

Everyone completely mistook it at the time, of course. The thing is, my main reason for getting into the big copper pot the palace cooks had put aside to cool was to see if I would float. Our tutor had been explaining about density, and how we floated better in salt water than in fresh, so naturally I thought of the pudding. That it was chocolate and delicious and still nicely warm and my very favorite dessert was completely irrelevant.

Anyway, I had just determined that I am more dense than fresh-made chocolate pudding when the cooks came back unexpectedly from their break (and why do cooks always all take their break together? I still wonder about that) and found me coming up for air. I was completely covered in chocolate, obviously, but they could tell who I was right away because I was the only blue-eyed six-year-old in the palace. They made a lot of noise, and hauled me out, and escorted me by the ear into the presence of my mother, the Queen.

I don't think I've ever seen her angrier. You've met my mother, you know how she can be. She just stood there silently staring at me dripping chocolate pudding onto the white floor of her office, her face getting whiter as the carpet got browner, and then she started yelling about how I wasn't allowed in the kitchens in the first place after the incident with the powdered sugar, and how I'd spoiled the pudding for everyone -- which just shows what she knew, because I'd been very careful about taking a really good bath first, so I wouldn't get the pudding dirty, and I went in naked to avoid messing up my clothes, specifically because I knew she hated when I did that, and yet she went on dressing me in white all the time anyway since that was traditional for children, Eab only knows why -- and how she'd never be able to keep good cooks on staff if I kept up doing things like that. I kept trying to explain to her that I'd never done anything exactly like that before, and that I'd I even brought a spoon in with me so that nobody could say I'd been eating with my hands like a baby, but she just went on shouting, and she wouldn't listen, and I got so frustrated that I started stamping my feet and got pudding all over everything, and that just made it worse.

She yelled some more, and she said that nobody else would want any of that pudding since I'd been playing in it (never mind that I wasn't playing, it was an experiment, and besides nowadays if I did that I know plenty of people who'd pay cash for the pudding, and now that I think of it that might be a good idea for a benefit for the war orphans on Perrys, but never mind that), and what a horrid waste that was, and that if I wanted it so much that I ought to have it, and that my punishment would be that I would get nothing else at meals until I'd finished all the pudding I'd spoiled. Then she turned on her heel and stalked out of the room, and left the cooks to call my governess, who thought it was the funniest thing she'd ever heard of and gave me the roughest scrubbing of my life.

So that's how it went: nothing but chocolate pudding for breakfast, lunch and dinner for what seemed like years but was actually only three weeks. Even at my brother's birthday party, when all the other kids got cake and ice cream, there was my dish of pudding. I overheard the maids talking about how cruel it was, and the cooks saying it went too far, and my brother saying he bet I'd never want another bite of chocolate pudding again in my life.

Of course, that was the point of the punishment, that too much of what I liked would ruin it for me. The thing is, it didn't work that way.

It was the best three weeks of my young life. I loved it, knowing that instead of my usual excruciatingly healthy breakfast cereal, I'd have pudding. At lunch time, when my brother and my cousins had their scientifically balanced sandwiches, I got pudding. And at dinner, when everyone else had to contend with all those confusing knives and forks and things, all I needed was a spoon. It was heavenly.

The day my punishment was over, my mother gave me my choice of any dessert I liked with my dinner. I chose chocolate pudding. She put her head down on the table and wept.

Ever since then, I've never quite understood the concept of too much of a good thing. It's my mother's least favorite thing about me, and she's the one who made me this way -- or at least she helped me find out that I'm this way much earlier than I might have.

You wonder, Kourt, why I still love your company every night (and day and morning and afternoon) when there are dozens of others just waiting for me to tire of you. Yes, I've experienced a great deal of variety over the years. But you are the very epitome of that good thing I can never get enough of.

I wonder if you'd float in chocolate pudding? I think we ought to find out.


End file.
